We Are Not Machines

I finished reading We Are Not Machines last week. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was full of insight and reflection into the impact of technology, automation, robotics, and AI on real-world jobs. It served as a good reminder to be thoughtful and wise with how we integrate technology into work and life.

Further, I thought this quote from the conclusion, was incisive in capturing our tendency to describe ourselves in machine-like ways:

I think many of us have gradually adopted some machine-like expectations for ourselves. We buy an endless array of books on how to maximize our personal productivity. We use gadgets to quantify and optimize everything about ourselves, from our sleep to our calorie intake to our exercise. Even when we try to resist, when all of this feels too much, we often describe ourselves and our needs in the language of machines. We say we need to ‘switch off’; that we need to ‘recharge our batteries’; even that we are ‘burned out’, which, when you think about it, sounds more like something that would happen to a machine than to a fleshy animal composed mostly of water.

That doesn’t feel like a healthy approach. Instead of using mechanical language to describe our needs, we should draw from the natural world and the human experience.